Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, has published on his blog an interesting status report for Python 3.0 ('Python 3000'), the upcoming major revision to the language scheduled for mid-2008. He discusses the rationale for redesigning the language, syntax changes, new features and libraries and inter-compatibility issues.

Many companies have retarded coding standards. Standards are usually elaborated by bureaucratic f--ks and are not a useful metric to determine whether doing things in a certain way is good or not.

For instance, I know of a big french company whose standard forces you to declare all variables at the beginning of functions in C++, which renders one of the most useful patterns of the language (RAII) impossible to use.

A common convention is to prefix member variables with m_, which solves the name hiding issue just as well and is much less ugly than "this->".